by Marge Piercy
The gods lose interest in a loser, he told himself. No vision came because he had squandered the one he had been given. Nothing moved through him. No power used him as its nexus for coming into the world. He remained only Corey—thin as wire and dry as paper, sitting cross-legged in the sun on a pile of rocks with a cold wind going through his ribs like a buzz saw. Below somewhere was the bloated shell of his other self, his love, his desire, his fearful dependency. Below somewhere too were his wife and his unborn child and his friend.
Vision would not come. After a while he could not keep his mind quiet. His mind came out of him in the form of a gnomic old man who skipped round and round him with the sun firing off Ben Franklin specs and explained and explained in a voice as monotonous and inevitable as the multiplication tables.
He had only thought of getting the kids out of the system. The system was such a nightmare to him that he had not tried to decipher its machinations, but only to make people feel the weight that pressed on them. Everything they might have offered as program seemed reformist and compromising in the face of apocalyptic revolution. Yet you could not win a violent revolution in the center of the empire with rifles against tanks and planes, if the Army would fight against you. You could not win with an isolated minority.
The secrecy, the paramilitary measures they took against police infiltration finally made them vulnerable to raids. The model of warfare, without the firepower to wage it, had seduced their imaginations. The lads who came in search of them were moved by their own alienation and the lure of their style, but for the passive others, the angry others, there were only the horror-story caricatures of the mass media to shape their responses. They had done no propaganda. They had been too turned off by the great square glimmering vacuums to do other than turn away, so they had no allies. If they would not consume, the society would turn and consume them. It would all work out in terms of profit and loss. Stability would return. The labor market would be less glutted. Whose children were these? Children of the gray box, children of the print-out, children of the deadly ray, of the comic book and the Pentagon. Their deaths would move only each other. Their putative parents grazed on meadows of corporate newsprint and grew fat and took pills to soothe their stomachs.
No vision came to him. No god, no totem, no devil on the mountain. No vision of the kingdoms of the earth or his psyche. On the fourth morning he made a small fire to cook the dried soup he had brought with him. Then as his strength came back, he went down the mountain.
Where his people had been encamped, he found a vast parched place, as if a desert had fallen over the land he remembered. There were no trees, no bushes, no birds, not a green or living thing. There were signs of great heat. The earth itself seemed shriveled. A fine ash blew in the breezes here and there. Baked clay and rock.
Now he must be seeing visions. Now finally he must be mad. He stopped to eat some chocolate and raisins, squatting, and then retraced his path up the mountain and jogged down again.
The same. He walked onto the new desert. Then at last in the distance, he caught sight of people and ran toward them. His heart was pounding with exhaustion. He would locate his people and collapse. There were workmen, he saw, here and there on the plain sucking up the fine ash in large trucks and hauling it away. Men were unloading black earth from trucks and planting bushes and orderly rows of saplings. A steam shovel was digging the bed for a small lake.
THIS PARK IS NOT PAID FOR BY YOUR TAXES
A big red, white, and blue sign explained that the new park was to be financed out of bonds that would be paid off from visitors’ fees.
He must find out what they had done with his people. He had to find Ginny and his son and Shawn. He ran through the dust and the fine ash blew into his nose, making him choke and sneeze.
Finally he staggered onto new earth. A man was operating a bulldozer there, spreading out the new ground evenly so that tire workers coming behind him could put down the rolls of turf like carpeting. Corey dragged himself panting toward the machine.
The driver, a small man with red sunburned skin, slowed down to gaze at him. Pushed up the goggles that hid the eyes: blue-gray eyes quick as minnows against the ruddy skin. “Well, if it isn’t Ned’s pal, Corey. How do? What brings you to these parts?”
“Big Ned’s father! Help me. Have you seen Big Ned?” He knew better as he asked. Big Ned had been exploded in Nebraska crossing the Platte. A shell had blown his head right off, and his body had fallen in the water and slowly sunk away.
“Now what would he be doing around here?” The old man tilted back his hat to scratch his head, puzzled.
“Help me, Mr. Howard. I can’t find my wife and baby”
“Son, you’re sure in trouble around here, I can tell you” Mr. Howard did not halt the bulldozer, but drove it forward.
He backed away. “Watch out, okay? What are you doing here, Mr. Howard? How come you’re not in Fink’s Bend? Could you shut that thing off?”
“I’m sorry for what I have to do, Corey. You young folks brought on the recession and they closed up the blue-jeans factory where Mrs. Howard was employed. We went on relief and times were hard. Then the government came recruiting for these clean-up jobs.”
“But my people? Where are my people?”
“They got removed to make way for a new camping park. Now, look, for the first time in over twelve years I’m holding down a regular job and the old woman’s coming out as soon as we can swing it. I have a job to do here, Corey, and it’s too bad, but a job is a job.” He drove the bulldozer right at Corey.
He did not run. “That’s okay, Mr. Howard. Don’t feel bad” Ned’s pa was getting taken to the cleaners. He’d bring his family out and the prices would go sky-high and eat up his wages. Then they’d finish up the job and lay him off and there wouldn’t be work to be had. Now there was only time quickly to ask for his death song, that it come to him, and that he die well.
He stood straight, held out his hands and sang between polluted earth and unpolluted sun:
I rode the buffalo
but now I have fallen off.
I lie on the ground.
Grandfather buffalo,
others will ride further.
Grandfather buffalo,
others will ride further.
Some finally
will break through
to the other side.
“Orders are orders. Look out, now!” Big Ned’s father stepped on the gas and the blade grew huge before him. Corey sang out loud:
“Some finally
will break through!”
The blade hit him with its dull weight, making him fall. As it rolled over him smashing his bones, his heart burst free like a rising crow, and he fainted.
Shawn and the Holy Ghost
When it had been dark all the time, Shawn had wanted to die. She had found him and led him out. She had found first him in the dark and then Marcus, but she could see. Marcus wanted to die too, he was so badly burned. Only Ginny did not want to die, and she did not want them to abandon their bodies. She held him gently, formally. Her belly kept him off. So long as he was blind, he felt neutered in his helplessness.
She was gentle with them both and angry at them. She would not love them, because they had not been willing to leave in time, because they had not been willing to escape. She told them they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman. But he felt suffocated. He thought of colors. If he could see only one color, any color, it would not matter which. Or if he could see in tones of gray, like an old movie. Or just light. He found it hard to sleep, now that it was always dark. She lay beside him, cradling him but unable to be touched, and she did not sleep either. Marcus moaned with pain.
They were a sorry family. Scar tissue made raised patterns on Marcus’ right arm and chest. He walked with a dragging limp. In his sleep he still moaned and shuddered. Ginny was big as a house and short of temper. She balanced her swollen belly on swollen legs, ho
bbling among the rocks. If Shawn came near her, she arched and hissed like a mistreated cat. He was not so bad as he had been. His eyes were still weak and sore. He wore shades all the time in the day. But even if his vision was blurred and perhaps always would be, he could see: colors, shapes, her face, rocks, an eagle circling, the intricately cracked mud of an arroyo, clouds, dust wraiths, the tea color of Ginny’s hair, the red-rimmed sadness of Marcus’ eyes, crickets hopping, a jack rabbit, the map of pain in livid pink and plum on Marcus’ bark-colored skin. The jack rabbit had a hard-on. It was early in the morning. Jack rabbit eyed man, while man squinted weakly at jack rabbit.
At dawn Saturday, he walked down into the little town and caught his ride in a truck to the gas station on the highway. He worked there weekends. He could see well enough to fill tanks and wipe windshields and test for oil. Wednesdays he helped them unload stock in the little town. The town was named Pancake. It was on the map. They had to fill up the road maps with something, so wherever there was a house, they put a town on the map. The map showed a dirt road going off the highway and ending there. It did not show the trail climbing to the abandoned cabin they had taken over. After he helped unload, he would pick out some supplies. Then he would hike carrying them the two miles mainly uphill to the cabin. They lived on what he made. Ginny took care of a patch of vegetables, the only living things in the world she was not angry at. Time went by slowly, whining like a circling mosquito.
Often she talked, but not to them. She was talking at Corey. Her bitterness crackled like burnt skin. “I thought I was strong enough. I thought I was whole enough. But his will to die was stronger than all my caring. He wanted her more than he wanted anything he pretended, more than any of the dreams or than any of his speeches or our ideas. More than the whole tribe put together. When he knew he couldn’t have her any more, he left us to die. It all comes down to the same old private-property thing. His own thing meant more to him than all the rest. Tons of bodies fertilizing nonsense.”
It was hot that day though it was fall, if they had fall here, and sweat stained her cotton dress. She had not been able to get herself into pants for a long time, so he had bought her two tent dresses. Now they were faded and stained with sweat. Actually the rest of her seemed smaller than ever, shrunken, with the huge belly crushing her under it. She would sit and hold her belly. “Maybe it’s a monster. That would be just like him to give me a monster. God knows what all that firepower did to it” She was joking bitterly, but he knew she was really afraid. She felt alien to the embryo. She claimed it kicked her viciously. She was afraid of the coming birth, but she refused to leave the cabin. She made him order her books on childbirth and read them all. Six books on having babies were cast around the cabin.
She was alone and animal in her pregnancy. She shut him out. She was kinder to Marcus, because Marcus had gone so far into his pain he did not threaten her as a man. As long as Shawn had been blind, she had suffered him to touch her, to hold her, though she would not make love. But when his vision began to seep back, she turned him into the other, the enemy, and shunted him away.
Sometimes he told himself he could just leave. Get on a bus on the highway with his weekly paycheck and take off for the horizon. Starting all over and over and over again. When the land was worked out, leave it. Move on to spoil new land.
He stayed put because they were the remains of the only thing besides his music he had ever committed himself to. Because if he could not be close to them, he would not manage with anybody else. Because he was worried about her and Marcus and the baby.
He bought a harmonica from a guy in the gas station. He made simple music now. Marcus and he sang together, and sometimes they made up songs. Marcus beat time on the boards of the porch. After a while he made a drum from a paint can. As Ginny grew closer and closer to term, Marcus took over what was left of the vegetable garden. The men worked on the house, trying to mend it, and began to talk politics. They discussed every decision minutely and took each of them again. They welded their separate histories into one and poked and prodded and turned it over. It became engaging. It was something they hurried back to together, like an interminable chess game. Not against each other; against history. Feeling very ancient and very young, they began to joke around. Ginny got even more irritated and tried to shut them up. “Stupid pricks! Men are always floating castles on a cloud of hot air! How dare you call that politics?” She sulked in her hugeness.
“If you’re a mouse fighting a tiger, maybe that’s the wrong question, what did I do wrong?” Marcus said. “We thought guns made us real, but it was people, and we didn’t have them. Move the people, and the system really is a paper tiger.”
Shawn said, “It’s still we win, or everybody loses. Time is almost gone. It’s the last great free-for-all robbery of everybody’s earth. They’re into polluting the ocean. The great famine is here.”
Marcus said, “People would always naturally be more comfy going to meetings with their brothers and sisters and arguing their itsy-bitsy doctrinaire song-and-dance routines, than going out in the streets to talk to the people. We couldn’t get a message out. We had to rely on you guys.”
“People get arrogant so fast. They confuse pain with virtue. Or if they’re like me, they let other people make the decisions. Two sides of weakness.”
Shawn thought he had come to understand a lot of things he had done wrong, and he tried to talk to her. “I left you alone with him too much. I could never figure out what I wanted enough to say it to you. I felt guilty about Joanna. Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break, Ginny”.
She was sitting on the porch sewing a torn blanket into a baby blanket. Her eyes when she raised them from the stitches went straight to the bleak wall of mountains.
He went on, “I let Corey tell me how to be used, because that was less work than taking hold of myself. I let him take you over because to fight it I would have had to stand up and say I wanted you and act, for a change.”
“As soon as he thought he could have her back, he shut himself off. He forgot he had loved me. He forgot he had come to me, broken and wanting me. He forgot his promises. I never asked him not to love her. I only asked him to go on being with me. What I hate is that I believed in him. I was taken and used. That’s what I hate—that I trusted”
He came back to Marcus with his self-analysis, but Marcus wasn’t having it either.
“Quit nit-picking your soul, you big old baby” Marcus whacked him none too kindly across the ass with his good hand. “Wait for the birth. With the milk she’s going to loosen. Her love will come down again. But if all you’re learning is how you should have done this and should have done that, and how to start carrying on like Corey did with Joanna, I think Ginny and me will just bury you out in the yard with the other unsuccessful pumpkins. Hang loose, Shawn. Horniness is stupefying your mind.”
The pains began in the early evening. At midnight she made them both get out of the cabin. Marcus and Shawn took their sleepingbags and lay down outside. Shawn could not sleep. He got angrier and angrier staring up at the sky, the smear of nebulae. Finally he rolled up his bag and came back in.
She glared at him from the bed. “What are you doing in here? Leave me alone. Get out!”
“No.” He squatted against the wall. “I’m staying with you.”
“I don’t want you here.”
“I want to be here. I’m in better shape to insist”
“Get out! I have a right to be alone.”
He shook his head. “No. We’re in this together.”
She laughed sharply, her laugh prolonged into high hysterical giggles. “It sure doesn’t feel that way!”
He remained squatting against the wall. She lay on the iron bed with its cracked ivory paint, waiting for each contraction, trying to go with it. She was soaked in sweat. Every time a contraction hit her, she writhed on the bed and the metal net of the bedspring jangled. He thought he could feel the waves of her pain crisping the
air.
“Why don’t you get out of here.? Just leave me alone”
“If I wanted to leave you alone, I could have hitched out of here a month ago.”
She was silent for a while. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because I feel married to you.”
“Oh, possession again.”
“Come off it, Ginny. The three of us are all that’s left. The three of us are married. Have I ever hung on, except when I was blind and you had to lead me?”
“You didn’t have sense enough to hang on even then. I had to hold on to you … But it’s his baby”
“No! It’s not his. It’s not even yours. It’s ours. Let Corey be the goddamn father. A ghost is a perfect father. Something that comes and goes without touching you. I want to be its second mother. And Marcus its third.”
“If there’s numbering, Marcus is number one. Number one motherfucker, number one mother. For instance, Marcus is remembering right now about how Ginny suppose to be breathing, and Ginny, she is just moaning and forgetting.” Marcus leaned in the doorway.
She groaned and heaved to and fro on the bed. Shawn could not tell if she had listened. Briefly she wept, and he came and wiped her face and neck with a washrag dipped in water from the metal basin.
“Listen! Listen to me. I keep thinking I’m going to give birth to a weapon—a little tank. Or a monkey. I’m going to have a furry hedgehog that will lick itself and run off into the brush” She paused for a contraction. “People can’t live any more. There’s room for machines and a little room left for animals. I don’t have too much hope for animals. But a sort of hedgehog or a shrew or a weasel that eats insects to start it all again! To go a long ways back, past apes, past monkeys, past mammals altogether with their strutting snarling males and their nurturing suffering females. Back to a furry hedgehog that eats insects and lays eggs, and try it again!”
“People can be good. Think about the farm.” He wiped her forehead again. “Sure, kids brought hang-ups, but they weren’t at each other’s throats. It wasn’t what we did right that destroyed us.
